In this web-text, we are interested in this swirl of lore, the ways in which
graduate students in English Studies shape, receive and circulate this
patchwork of doing. We focus on students in English Studies because
these are the students and faculty in our institutional spaces: those we teach with, take classes from, and take classes with. We begin here by positing that story can become a productive lens through which to explore graduate student literacy practices. Linda Adler-Kassner, for example, has stressed the importance of collecting, circulating, and controlling the "story" of writing in WPA work. Stories, she explains, create larger narratives of experience: “those stories, when seen as a collective body, testif[y] and [give] witness to a larger one that had gone relatively unexplored" (5). Indeed, collecting stories from graduate students is already a well-established means of studying graduate literacy (Haswell, Good & Warshauer); however, because most efforts to collect narratives from graduate students are print-based and bound as books, they offer little room for un-analyzed, interactive, or "raw" accounts of graduate literacy practices.
Here then, as we extend what we take to be the important work of gathering graduate literacy stories, we argue for the implicit value of narratives "in the raw"--accounts of graduate work and experience that are uncut, unadorned, improvisational, playful, immediate, interactive, organic, and embodied. We're not so much interested in rosy tales of perserverance and nostalgia, or the polished narratives bound in anthologies. By offering the phrase "literacy in the raw," we mean that we're first interested in practices and stories directly from our communities. We want to hear actual voices, experience vulnerability, and catalyze conversational and empathic connection. Methodologically, we believe that these stories are useful whether or not we assess and analyze them, or make them "count" as data. In other words, we suggest that while narrative doesn't serve up theory or data, it has plenty to teach us, when we listen:
graduate students in English Studies shape, receive and circulate this
patchwork of doing. We focus on students in English Studies because
these are the students and faculty in our institutional spaces: those we teach with, take classes from, and take classes with. We begin here by positing that story can become a productive lens through which to explore graduate student literacy practices. Linda Adler-Kassner, for example, has stressed the importance of collecting, circulating, and controlling the "story" of writing in WPA work. Stories, she explains, create larger narratives of experience: “those stories, when seen as a collective body, testif[y] and [give] witness to a larger one that had gone relatively unexplored" (5). Indeed, collecting stories from graduate students is already a well-established means of studying graduate literacy (Haswell, Good & Warshauer); however, because most efforts to collect narratives from graduate students are print-based and bound as books, they offer little room for un-analyzed, interactive, or "raw" accounts of graduate literacy practices.
Here then, as we extend what we take to be the important work of gathering graduate literacy stories, we argue for the implicit value of narratives "in the raw"--accounts of graduate work and experience that are uncut, unadorned, improvisational, playful, immediate, interactive, organic, and embodied. We're not so much interested in rosy tales of perserverance and nostalgia, or the polished narratives bound in anthologies. By offering the phrase "literacy in the raw," we mean that we're first interested in practices and stories directly from our communities. We want to hear actual voices, experience vulnerability, and catalyze conversational and empathic connection. Methodologically, we believe that these stories are useful whether or not we assess and analyze them, or make them "count" as data. In other words, we suggest that while narrative doesn't serve up theory or data, it has plenty to teach us, when we listen:
Two such "raw" literacy narratives. See more narratives on the interactive collage page.
Often the most meaningful moments of insights into literacies are felt,
spontaneous, embodied, and immediate: the grip of panick we face going into finals week, the harried calculations we run while surveying the week's reading load, the vacuuming between drafts, the epiphany that comes in the shower, the baking and making cups of tea to recharge, the voices of scholars we read last week in our minds as we write, the Facebook status updates from peers expressing anxieties or frustrations around writing, those honest accounts of work in graduate school exchanged in the hall, in the office, at the bar. To work in the raw is to place value and trust in the half-formed, unfinished, unchecked thoughts that escape escape our mouths, those candid moments of engagement and vulnerability. This, we suggest, is where graduate literacy lives. There is intimacy here. There are bodies here. And because we see literacy accumulating in these sudden, improvised and viscerally felt moments, we attempt to capture and showcase student stories in the same spirit.
The three of us came together as collaborators interested in exploring the ways we come to know how to do literacy work in grad school. At first, we didn't value this "raw" interaction and conversation around literacy. Over the long course of our collaboration, we've each gathered data about graduate literacies differently: we've surveyed, interviewed, analyzed, theorized. We've struggled to extrapolate and rigorously "read" our
participants' experiences. But our attempts to generalize from our
data lacked depth and importance. We were searching for a method, a paradigm, to make the voices of our colleagues heard. Across this research-patchwork, we kept coming back to what was happening to us as researchers in those lived conversations about reading and writing. We valued the exchange, the honesty, and the insights that emerged as we inquired about reading and writing in our own programs.
In light of these realizations, we invited our colleagues to share their stories, their struggles, their triumphs about reading and writing (click on flyer to the left). We uploaded these narratives--some print, some video, and others audio-based--to the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives (DALN), hoping to establish a broad and rich collection of stories from graduate students across disciplines. Our webtext offers a selection and arrangement of some of these voices as well as links to additional stories in the DALN. While the archive has been understood as a repository for raw data, we will suggest in addition that literacy learning can happen in engaging the archive as an interactive space.
By advocating literacy in the raw and by encouraging interaction and emotive response to literacy stories, we are arguing for more "talk" around literacy experiences that cannot be found in textbooks or conference presentations. A full-bodied, affective, and interactive experience, writing our ways into these academic communities presses on the full range of the emotional spectrum, from elation to frustration. We come to learn literacy practices through honest and open-ended interactions with each other, our professors, and professionals in our field about what it means to do writing, reading, communicating, collaborating, and professionalizing. In this way, literacy in the raw encourages us to rethink how we deliver, circulate, and share our practices. As a means of bringing graduate literacy to the fore, out of its embeddedness and unspokenness, we offer here an entry into a collective digital archival space, where graduate students can connect and interact in a/synchronous time and across space, where literacy learning can happen in the raw.
spontaneous, embodied, and immediate: the grip of panick we face going into finals week, the harried calculations we run while surveying the week's reading load, the vacuuming between drafts, the epiphany that comes in the shower, the baking and making cups of tea to recharge, the voices of scholars we read last week in our minds as we write, the Facebook status updates from peers expressing anxieties or frustrations around writing, those honest accounts of work in graduate school exchanged in the hall, in the office, at the bar. To work in the raw is to place value and trust in the half-formed, unfinished, unchecked thoughts that escape escape our mouths, those candid moments of engagement and vulnerability. This, we suggest, is where graduate literacy lives. There is intimacy here. There are bodies here. And because we see literacy accumulating in these sudden, improvised and viscerally felt moments, we attempt to capture and showcase student stories in the same spirit.
The three of us came together as collaborators interested in exploring the ways we come to know how to do literacy work in grad school. At first, we didn't value this "raw" interaction and conversation around literacy. Over the long course of our collaboration, we've each gathered data about graduate literacies differently: we've surveyed, interviewed, analyzed, theorized. We've struggled to extrapolate and rigorously "read" our
participants' experiences. But our attempts to generalize from our
data lacked depth and importance. We were searching for a method, a paradigm, to make the voices of our colleagues heard. Across this research-patchwork, we kept coming back to what was happening to us as researchers in those lived conversations about reading and writing. We valued the exchange, the honesty, and the insights that emerged as we inquired about reading and writing in our own programs.
In light of these realizations, we invited our colleagues to share their stories, their struggles, their triumphs about reading and writing (click on flyer to the left). We uploaded these narratives--some print, some video, and others audio-based--to the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives (DALN), hoping to establish a broad and rich collection of stories from graduate students across disciplines. Our webtext offers a selection and arrangement of some of these voices as well as links to additional stories in the DALN. While the archive has been understood as a repository for raw data, we will suggest in addition that literacy learning can happen in engaging the archive as an interactive space.
By advocating literacy in the raw and by encouraging interaction and emotive response to literacy stories, we are arguing for more "talk" around literacy experiences that cannot be found in textbooks or conference presentations. A full-bodied, affective, and interactive experience, writing our ways into these academic communities presses on the full range of the emotional spectrum, from elation to frustration. We come to learn literacy practices through honest and open-ended interactions with each other, our professors, and professionals in our field about what it means to do writing, reading, communicating, collaborating, and professionalizing. In this way, literacy in the raw encourages us to rethink how we deliver, circulate, and share our practices. As a means of bringing graduate literacy to the fore, out of its embeddedness and unspokenness, we offer here an entry into a collective digital archival space, where graduate students can connect and interact in a/synchronous time and across space, where literacy learning can happen in the raw.
Next Page >>